go home again.
My legs buckled beneath me and my knees slammed into the concrete. My jaw snapped shut with the impact, but I hardly felt it. I was a cryptid living under false pretenses, and no one would care that I hadn’t known. Most probably wouldn’t even believe that.
I pushed my arms through the sleeves of my shirt, but had trouble buttoning it. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
Gone. Everything I’d ever had was probably already gone. My job. My apartment. My car. My clothes. Cryptids weren’t allowed to own property or enter into contracts. Including leases.
“Deputy Atherton, I think I need to talk to an attorney.” My voice had almost no tone and very little volume. I seemed to be hearing myself from one end of a long tunnel.
He turned and headed down the aisle toward me again. “They’re not gonna give you a lawyer, Delilah. Cryptids aren’t citizens. You have no rights in the U.S. of A., in Franklin County, or in the incorporated township of Franklin. You are now the property of the state of Oklahoma.”
Property. No rights.
“Unless they decide you are a surrogate,” Atherton continued. “If that happens, the feds will come for you.”
And I would never be seen again.
I clutched my half-buttoned shirt to my chest and scooted back into the corner, pressing my spine into the seam where both brick walls met. The world seemed to be shrinking around me, as if someone were sucking all the air out of a vacuum-sealed bag. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
“Is your mother still over on Sycamore?” Deputy Atherton asked, and a fresh bolt of fear opened my lungs. “They’re sending someone to pick her up.”
“Leave her alone.” My gaze snapped up to meet his, and his brows rose. “She has nothing to do with this. She’s human.”
“You thought you were human, too, and you were wrong about that. Is there anything we should know before they knock on her door?”
I held his gaze in silence.
“They’re already on their way, Delilah. If you know something that will keep her from getting hurt, you need to tell me.”
“She sleeps with my dad’s shotgun under her bed.” I crossed my arms over my knees and stared at the ground. “Better call first and let her know you’re coming. That, or send an ambulance in advance.”
Atherton’s brows rose. He unclipped a radio from his belt and relayed my mother’s itchy trigger finger to someone in Dispatch.
My bare toes curled on the concrete, and I wished for a pair of shoes. My racing thoughts had stilled into a single bold question mark, and the mental silence was almost as confining as the bars caging me.
“So, what happens now?”
He pulled a thick, rusty pair of medieval-looking iron cuffs from a pouch at his back. “Come on, Delilah. Get up. It’s time to meet the sheriff.”
“Turn around and stick both hands between the bars.”
The theory seemed to be that my hands were my weapons, and that with them restrained in iron behind my back I would be much less of a threat.
I complied, and the cuffs closed over my wrists one at a time. They were heavy, and the weight felt both surreal and brutally degrading. But surely if I were going to have any adverse reaction to iron—which would narrow my species down to one out of hundreds of kinds of fae—the bars on my cell would have triggered it already.
Iron was the only way that we knew of to identify the fae. Most of them had one feature or another that clothes wouldn’t cover—feathers, a hollow back, vines growing in place of hair—but glamour was a better disguise than any clothing, contact lenses, or wigs could ever hope to be.
Once I was cuffed, the deputy let me out of my cell and guided me down the aisle. He didn’t touch me. In fact, he seemed to be walking a couple of feet behind me until he had to come forward and open the door at the end of the aisle.
The moment I stepped into the open front room of the sheriff’s station, all phone calls and typing ceased. The ambient nervous chatter died, and everyone turned to watch me be escorted across the room. None of the stares were friendly. Even the people in handcuffs looked at me as if I were a slimy clump dug from their shower drains.
My face flamed. I wanted to hide, but the best I could do was let my hair swing forward to shield part of my face.
Several feet into my barefoot walk of shame, I saw Brandon sitting in a cracked plastic waiting room chair. I tripped over my own nerves and Deputy Atherton started to catch me, then changed his mind. I saw the moment it happened. He was reaching for me, probably out of instinct, then suddenly recoiled. He flinched—as if I were a snake about to strike, when really I was falling face-first toward the dingy yellow floor tile, unable to catch myself with my hands cuffed at my back.
Brandon stared at his shoes as I staggered, then awkwardly regained my balance on my own. I recognized tension in the cords standing out from his neck, as if he wanted to look, but was fighting the urge.
“Brandon,” I called once I was steady, and my voice cracked on the first syllable. His jaw clenched, but he didn’t look up. My flush deepened. “Brandon.” Raw desperation echoed in my voice and a couple of strangers sneered at the tender bits of my heart and soul I’d exposed.
My boyfriend of four years was the only person in the room not watching me.
“Brandon, please.” My cheeks were scalding and my throat ached. But I couldn’t believe he would abandon me without a word. He knew better than anyone else in the world aside from my mother that I would never hurt someone on purpose.
Deputy Atherton took me by the arm, evidently having gathered the courage to touch me in the face of my humiliation. “Come on, Delilah.”
“No.” I jerked free of his grip, and people all over the room flinched. “Say it, Brandon,” I demanded, and at first he didn’t move. Then my roommate and lover—one of my very best friends—stood and marched toward the exit, as if he wanted to run, but pride wouldn’t let him. “Brandon! Say it, you fucking coward!”
He froze halfway to the door, and my heart stilled along with him. Then slowly, Brandon turned. His eyes were red. His jaw was clenched. He looked at me as if he didn’t even know who I was.
“How could you do this to me?”
“I didn’t—”
“The whole thing was a lie,” he shouted, and I flinched. “You were a lie! I trusted you. I told you everything. I ate with you and slept next to you, and the whole time you were some kind of monster, just using me as part of your human camouflage. There is no Delilah Marlow.”
“No, that’s not true. It was all real! I didn’t know!” I took a step toward him, but Atherton grabbed my arm again, and several other deputies placed hands on the
